Tag Archives: polls

We all know content is king, but there are only so many posts that you can churn out before your creativity/willing evaporates. So how can you get your community to become more engaged with your site and contribute?

1. Comments – It may sound obvious but so many blogs and websites still don’t allow comments, so activate the comment box and get communicating. Respond to all comments with more information and debate, you want to stimulate debate on your website.

2. Ask the Right Questions to get Debate – Now your community can comment you need to provoke a bit of debate. Users won’t readily comment they will only do so if they feel they have something to say, if your post leaves them feeling cold, they’ll stay quiet. So finish your posts with a question it could be as simple as what do you think? Or have you got anything to add?

3. Polls – are a great and simple way to get your community involved and reacting to your posts. There are loads of different tools that you can use most of which can easily embedded into your blog/website. Our favourites are;
i) PollDaddy
ii) micropoll.com
iii) twiigs.com
All three can be embedded onto your blog or website and PollDaddy even comes with analytics so you can see who is responding. Here are a couple we made earlier on PollDaddy about what you think of UGC.

4. Use the Right Tools – aside from polls there are literally hundreds of tools out there that help you to get more user generated content. We love Nabble, a tool that allows you to seamlessly embed a forum into your website ( unfortunately only as long as it is WordPress.org).

The forum took two minutes to create and is embedded with a quick copy and paste of HTML code. Users stay on your site when using the forum and can share posts with social media plugins, helping your UGC reach a wider audience with no extra work for you! Call us lazy but we like that even if it is only available on WordPress.org!

5. Get the Community to do it for YOU!– FV Community News is a WordPress.org plugin that allows you to create a form for users to submit fully formed articles with pictures, tags and they can be posted automatically on your site or after moderation straight off a fully intergrated WordPress dashboard.

Intergrated dashboard with FV Community News plugin

The plugin is completely spam proof using the same Aksimet system as WordPress. All you have to do is click “approve” and hey presto some brand spanking new UGC content. It is also good for receiving anonymous tips! You can see here what it looks like on Divito Design.

Lastly, but most definitely not least… optimize your publishing date and time. There is no excuse for not doing this as you can pre-set publishing time and dates for your posts! Time the publication so the maximum number of your readers will be online and your content isn’t lost in the big digital sea! A fellow member of team GbU did a similar post on this a few weeks ago!

So let us know what you think? Or if you have any top UGC generating tips, Comment, Tweet or go on our UGC forum!

Many journalists, bloggers and businesses rely on research surveys to direct their products and output.

Research surveys have been vital in the past but the top research executive of Procter & Gamble Co., (Joan Lewis) has said that she expects research surveys to dramatically decline in importance by 2020. The reason?- social media.

Joan Lewis, is responsible for P&G’s $350 million budget in annual market-research outlays. She has warned that the advertising industry should get away from “believing a method, particularly survey research, will be the solution to anything,” she said. “We need to be methodology agnostic.” However this doesn’t just apply to the advertising industry. It has more far reaching applications to any businesses or media.

Another important element P&G warned was that businesses are not being interactive enough. Indeed, P&G were the only UK company among the top five companies to use Twitter.

Joan told the conference: “The more people see two-way engagement and being able to interact with people all over the world, I think the less they want to be involved in structured research,” she said. “If I have something to say to that company now, there are lots of ways to say it.”

As UGC is recognised by big business we should realize it is just as important in our online community and journalism.

Using online polls, Twitter and other forms of trending provide an insight into the feelings of the online community. As the online community can include a whole strata of the public, it can offer a good cross section and therefore act as an accurate research facility. The ability to target a specific audience by targeting different social media forums is also a key advantage.

Ok so over the last few months we have brought you loads of interviews with the ‘big-wigs’ of UGC and News organisations. Now we want to know what YOU our loyal readers and lovers of online journalism think…